Sudan blocks Ugandan delegation from meeting LRA leader
KAMPALA, June 05, 2004 (New Vision) — Former minister Betty Bigombe’s peace mission to Sudan ended in heartbreak this week after Sudanese officials blocked her from meeting rebel leader Joseph Kony.
Bigombe has been in Sudan since April 24 and made two visits to southern Sudan. Bigombe and her team were due to leave Juba yesterday afternoon “after Sudanese military officials persistently blocked all planned meetings with Kony”, according to a source in the team who preferred anonymity.
The Bigombe team said they have spent three weeks in southern Sudan, received two emissaries sent by Kony but this week, the Sudanese army blocked even the emissaries from meeting them.
In a telephone interview with The New Vision, LRA commander ‘Brigadier’ Livingstone Opiro, who said he was coordinating the communication between Bigombe and the LRA chief, said Kony had decided to “come back to Uganda and continue contact with the Uganda government from inside the country since the Sudanese have frustrated everything”.
Bigombe said Opiro had been coordinating the meetings but refused to discuss the problems her team has been facing in Sudan.
A team member said upon their arrival in Sudan, military officials led by Major General Awad Ibn Ouf, the head of Sudan’s military intelligence, denied that they knew Kony’s whereabouts.
“The most insulting was when they told us on Monday this week that Kony had sent a four-man team led by General Khamis to meet us. They returned later to say that the general sent by Kony did not want to meet us. They probably thought we were too ignorant to know that there is no such person as General Khamis in the LRA,” the member said by phone from Juba.
On previous occasions, the team said they went to within four kilometres of Kony’s camps, “but the Sudanese army officers told us Ugandan troops were nearby and had dangerous guided missiles that could kill us and they are blamed.”
He said on many occasions, Sudanese officials dealt with them “as if they were dealing with five-year-olds”.
According to information from the team, Sudan’s foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail and Maj. Gen. Awad and another general, sent a message that they were travelling to Juba this weekend with the British ambassador to Khartoum, to meet Bigombe before announcing that the “LRA has refused to meet the team and has rejected peace talks”.
Mustafa Ismail was then scheduled to travel to Kampala for the COMESA summit.
The Bigombe team said they were infuriated and were returning to Khartoum “to go home and sort things out from there but the outside world should know that our hosts never wanted us to meet Kony for reasons they know best”.
Apparently, President Yoweri Museveni had secured a personal commitment from Sudanese president Omar el-Bashir that the Khartoum officials would facilitate the meeting between Bigombe and Kony.
“But his officials in the army seemed to know nothing,” the team said.
The source said Kony said he would move back to Uganda from where talks would continue.
If Kony returns to northern Uganda, it would the first time the rebel leader spends a considerable amount of time in the region since he first set up base in Sudan in 1994.
It would also indicate that Kony’s demands that he would negotiate with the Government only outside the country, would be difficult to meet.
Bigombe is expected to brief Museveni about her Sudan mission sometime next week either in Kampala or in the US where Museveni has been invited by President George Bush for a summit comprising six other African leaders.